Gadgetory

this week on cnet tech review we're on hand as Apple almost apologizes for the iphone antenna problems go for a test drive in the 2011 ford mustang shelby gt500 sedam Ackerman's favorite laptop of the year and I countdown cnet's top 5 desktop computers it's all coming up right now hey folks welcome to cnet tech review rounding up our hottest videos of the week and telling you which are good which are bad and offering some tech wisdom in the form of a bottom line i'm brian cooley filling in for molly wood while she's out covering comic-con now I know Molly usually kicks off the show with the good section but I'm gonna go a little different direction that's right we're starting things off with the bad at the end of last week Steve Jobs held a rare press conference to try and put antennagate to bed brian Tong broke away from his hair stylist for a couple of hours to bring us the full story riot on here with cnet com for the Apple by now we know Apple threw a little wrench into our show so we're gonna jump right into what they announced and they'll figure out how the rest of the show plays out now first up Apple will be giving out a free case for all people who own a current iphone for every iphone user is going to get a free case so that could be a bumper case or you could go online in order one from a variety of vendors that they have the other thing that they're going to do is also offer purchasers of the iphone for a full refund it doesn't matter if it's outside of the return date now when Steve Jobs came out on stage it really crafted this story to give you data points and really make you feel like you could understand situation they demoed off apples phones comparing it with other phones like the samsung omnia two they also did the blackberry bold 9700 to show that other phones do have this symptom then they also push the fact that only a half a percent of all iphone 4s do exhibit this symptom and then on top of that they want to show people that well are people really returning these things still a third of people who returned the iphone 3gs returning the iphone 4s they really wanted to pound across the one that this is really not happening sometimes on the internet things appear bigger than they really are but the bottom line here our consumers going to be happy with what Steve Jobs said we asked Josh Lowensohn from cnet com I think people are going to be split this is a big dividing thing a lot of the people the critics of the phone are going to say yep told you so and a lot of people with the phone I'm going to look at their phone and say okay now I have a case so this will work right and Apple just acknowledge that I think that's really troubling but as iphone odor myself you know I do i do feel okay the fact that they acknowledged it and they're very upfront about what's wrong with it and then compared to other phones where this happens to so I think you know that's the best case scenario we can have until iphone 5 so there you have it free bumper cases or cases for everyone if you want to return your phone you can do that as well now let's get back to the show what's up i'm brian Tong and welcome to the apple pie for all the good things and bad stuff inside the world of apple and last week yeah was not really a good one for Apple but could it get any worse well apple recently posted the first beta for iOS 4.1 and it appears that it includes the signal bar display Corrections you can see here that signal bars 1 2 & 3 have increased in display size incredible now we all know Apple is infamous for ripping on other companies like Microsoft and Adobe well now they're getting a taste of their own medicine after motorola and verizon use a full-page ad in The New York Times to tout the droid x's ability to be held any way you like then Microsoft coo kevin turner said the iphone 4 might be there vista oh snaps you know the only thing lower than that in the geek world is like making a mama joke or if your last girlfriend says you have a floppy drive that I know all right an iPad rumor news digit times is reporting that Apple is planning to release a smaller version of its three million units sold and Counting tablet in the first quarter of 2011 reportedly 5.6 inch and 7 inch screens are being ordered by Apple alongside the standard 9.7 iPad screen the smaller screen iPads might be geared more towards the e-reader market but what will they call these things I already have my ipad nano right here we didn't get to this last episode but with sep tember getting closer that means ipod refreshes are on their way you can always count on chinese websites that claim they have the front panels for the next gen ipod touch now online pictures show a hole at the top quite possibly for a front-facing camera now I fix it did the breakdown for mac rumors and show that the iphone 4s camera won't fit inside a current ipod touch unless they change the form factor now we're confident we'll see some sort of camera action on the next ipod touch but FaceTime uses AT&T s network to initiate the call so Apple is going to have to tweak the software if we expect to see this on the touch and in other ipod in music news apple's lolla calm acquisition a few months ago has sparked dreams of an iTunes streaming service MPD data recently surveyed close to 4,000 users and fifteen percent of the respondents would be willing to pay a minimum ten dollar monthly fee access to itunes content on multiple devices now if you apply those numbers to the 50 million US itunes customers that would represent 1 billion dollars waiting for Apple in just its first year the main obstacle to make this happen is getting the music labels on board and those dreams aren't coming true anytime soon alright that's gonna do it for this week's show send your emails to the apple bite at cnet com i'm brian Tong thanks for watching and we'll see you next week for another bite of the Apple honestly antennagate is almost a bigger scandal than Watergate since most iphone 4 users are missing a lot more than just 18 and a half minutes of their calls maybe AT&T can hire some plumbers couldn't make things any worse moving on in the bad in this day and age of cloud computing why is it so hard to have your browser bookmarks show up on whatever computer you're using not to mention on your smartphone some recent upgrades to Firefox have made this a little easier but we're still a long way from using it on our iphones Firefox users has long been awaiting a version for iphone but with apples ironclad restrictions firefox on the iphone seems like just a pipe dream then those clever folks at mozilla came up with a different approach I'm Jessica doll court with Cena taking a first look at firefox home one point oh the closest you may ever get to surfing Firefox on the iPhone simply put firefox home is a free syncing app that gets you access to your firefox search history bookmarks and open tabs on a laptop or computer it ties into the Firefox Sync extension that Mozilla recently rolled out so you can't use the iPhone app without the browser add-on once you install Firefox Sync on your home computer you can log into firefox home on your iPhone you start typing into the search bar to scour your history and bookmarks for a URL you recently entered you can also pull up your list of bookmarks to quickly get to sites you previously saved from your desktop the app also remembers the last set of browser tabs that Firefox had it open you can view those within the apps viewer or open the URL and Safari to fully interact the app also lets you email the URL to a friend or copy it to the clipboard we should note that Firefox Sync in Firefox homesync periodically not every time you make a change so you should manually refresh the ad on a nap if you're intent on getting to a certain website from your iphone also because you're syncing data is stored in the cloud Firefox doesn't have to be open on the desktop or laptop for you to plumb your history with firefox home firefox home is a great tool for taking your work with you and saving you from having to search safari for urls that you've already visited somewhere else it could still use some more tweaking like being able to share URLs to Facebook and your social networks because of apple's kibosh on competing browsers were unlikely to see a lot of additional functionality in the add-on space but we are glad to connect our desktop browsing to the iphone i'm jessica doll cord and this is firefox home one point 0 for iphone come on Apple just let us have firefox on our iphones have you seen some of the stupid apps you've approved okay enough slumming let's get to the good stuff one great thing about hosting the show this week is that I get to play lots of my videos for example this news cnet top 5 best desktop computers yep we still use them poor desktop computers for like a decade they were the sensible shoes as things like notebooks netbooks smartphones and tablets came out but desktops are hot again I'm Brian Cooley with a scenic top five best desktop computers according to cnet's reviews number five the painfully named gateway SX 2840 dash 0 1 are they kidding this a budget PC that is the one to beat it's a quad core with really smooth video playback a terabyte hard drive and an hdmi output so it's a real good candidate for the living room especially since it has a small stylish case that doesn't say i'm the kind of dork who puts a computer in the living room number for HP touchsmart 600 now the windows industry has been trying to crack the imac recipe for ages and honestly not doing it but HP comes the closest with this one solid apps that leverage the touchscreen great media features and you know it actually looks pretty good it's not an imac but it doesn't cost as much as a cheap used car either number 3 another winner from Gateway oof the FX 68 31 dash 0 1 we're not real big fans of the red exterior lighting or the fact that the case looks like a robot's lunchbox but this is a really hot gaming PC priced like a utility machine number two the origin Genesis with Intel's Core i7 920 processor okay I haven't spent this much on all the pcs I've ever owned but if you've got about 5 grand freed up for your next gaming rig this guy is our unqualified recommendation best performance we've ever seen enough said before we get to our number one best desktop computer why our desktops hot again two main reasons windows 7 got really good reviews especially coming off the mess that was Vista and OS 10 machines are enjoying the halo that works around all things apple oh by the way the average selling price of a new desktop computer this year six hundred and seventy dollars okay now it's time to reveal our number one desktop PC it's apple's imac the 27-inch with a two point eight gig intel core i7 with that voracious core processor a 27-inch screen that looks even bigger thanks to that edge-to-edge glass seamless ability to run OS 10 and windows and a perfect 10 from us for its overall design you can't do any better for a high ability desktop desktops hot again didn't see that one coming well that's it for this edition of top 5 i'm brian cooley from cnet com we'll see you next time no really desktop computers hot again well hot in a cougar he kind of way anyway I'll show you something really hot later in the show now if desktops seem a little antique dan ackerman has his computing to go at a much fresher level with a couple of first looks at his favorite laptops I'm Dan Akron and we are here with the asus eeepc 1018 now I know you're used to hearing a lot of numbers after EPC model numbers like the popular 1005 or the less expensive one thousand eight by pumping the number all the way up to 1018 asus has actually gone back to the drawing board at least aesthetically and come up with a new design for the super popular epc line the internal components haven't really changed that much but from the outside it's a whole different animal now it's cladded brushed metal it's thinner than it used to be it's got a much more upscale sophisticated look we like it a lot feels a lot more sturdy than the kind of plastic netbooks that you might be used to even though at three hundred and fifty dollars it's only 50 bucks more than the Super entry-level 299 models but even though it looks really cool inside it's kind of the same system it's still got a 10 inch display at 1024 x 600 resolution still got the same intel atom n450 1 gig ram windows seven starter so not anything really new there it's got the island style keyboard that asus has been using lately we like that a lot this model has a new touchpad it's a little bit bigger which is great and the left and right mouse buttons even though they're on one bar down here they're at least textured kind of big definitely better than we've seen on previous epc model the new pc still is the same great battery life were used to from asus eee pcs or even other netbooks performance wise it's still going to give you that netbook experience you have to really temper your expectations you know good for web surfing basic productivity some very light multimedia playback that's about it as long as your expectations are modest you can definitely get away with using a netbook some most or even all the time if you're not doing anything to intensive since netbooks are essentially commodity products in a lot of ways because they really do all have pretty much the same components inside you're really buying based on price and based on look and feel so because they're keeping the price down and they've got this really cool new design there's a lot to like about this new version i'm dan ackerman and then is the asus eee pc 1000 i'm dan ackerman and we are here taking a look at the toshiba portege r700 5 now there's really no such thing as a perfect laptop but this guy hits a lot of the right notes it's a 13-inch laptop in support of toshiba portege line we really like a lot of the previous models like they are 500 that was a 12 inch laptop for this version they bumped up to 13 same size as the basic 13-inch MacBook while keeping the price down and keeping the opponents pretty good this version has an intel core i3 processor in it there's actually a industrial version called the r700 rather than the 705 where you can get core i5 and core i7 processors this one's got the core i3 it's got a 500 gig hard drive it's got a bunch of cool extras like Intel's wireless display technology which lets you connect the video output from this laptop to let's say a big-screen TV you need to get a $99 external net your adapter for that but if you want to just send your signal basically through wireless HDMI that's a great way to do it that's only built into a handful of laptop so far and this is one of them but for about 8 99 or even 799 on sale you get a 13 inch display you get this solid magnesium alloy construction it's got an accelerometer on the hard drive so it'll park the heads if you drop it or jostle it too much and of course you get in SD card slot in a SATA port and an hdmi port all things you're not going to find on the one to two hundred dollar more expensive basic white macbook the keyboard is the basic island style similar to what you find on a macbook or a sony vaio and the touchpad it's about as big as any we see on a 13-inch laptop except of course for the macbook because they've got a mix of decent components really good price and nice high-end design this is very likely going to end up being one of our favorite laptops of 2010 i am dan ackerman and then z toshiba portege r700 5 one of our favorite laptops of 2010 it's only mid-year pretty bold statement to make at this point Danno not as bold as that tie however okay folks time to take a break smoke em if you got them but keep your ticket stub because you'll want to come right back in for a hard drive like you've never seen in a car you need to drive hard right after this welcome back to the cnet tech review our weekly video digest of all the things good and bad we've seen here at cnet TV continuing on now with the good it's hard to get too excited about external hard drives I mean at the very least they just sit there at worse they sit there and make too much noise and ideal easy just hold stuff so compared to most external drives the hitachi life studio mobile plus is downright interactive check it out if you have a lots of thorough and often have a hard time fighting a particular one among them then have something for you this is the live studio mobile plus external hard drive from hitachi this is a rather special external hard drive and it's come in three parts the external hard drive itself a docking station and a USB key essentially the key is a thumb drive with storage being included four gigabyte microSD card you can change this card for another and upgrade the keys capacity to up to 32 gigabyte of storage however if you already have another thumb drive the key is rather redundant unless you want to use it as a micro card reader the last video mobile plus is bus power meaning is included standard mini USB cable it is for both the data connection and to draw power directly from the computer's USB port in case one port doesn't provide in AB juice the dry also come with a second why shape cable that use to port at a time in our trials however the drive only needed one USB port to work unfortunately the dry does not support you speed through point O and has no firewire connection either to make up for this it come with Hitachi's live studio software this is a flash based application that automatically is by all the contents on the computer's hard drive both internal and external and display them in a visually clear chronological order you can even view them in the form of 3d world must like the cover flow of fake of the ipod you can use the live studio software to hook up the computers content with social websites such as flickr or facebook and vice versa you can also view facebook photo and brooms view the software 3d interface unfortunately the live studio software does not support network storage devices at 130 dollar for 500 gigabyte and 100 dollar for 320 gigabyte the live studio mobile plus is a pretty good deal to check out it is live studio software is something that serves you well check out the in-depth review etsy com once again my name is dumb low and this has been the first look at the live studio mobile plus external hard drive from cat I like how you can actually use the thumb drive portion as a card reader I'd call that the Swiss Army knife of USB drives except it's already one of those and now it's time for this week's bottom line you know I've only played one of my videos so far in this show that's pretty big of me now I go petty let's wrap this week's tech review with one of mine a taste of the 2011 ford mustang shelby gt500 giddyup yeah it's a 550 horsepower mustang but that's just a speck what really sets this car apart is the name on its rump and the man whose it is let's get into 2011 ford mustang shelby gt500 check the legacy and the text I Shelby's unique among American hot rods because of this guy carroll shelby a tall lanky texan who's been making cars go fast his whole life and doing so with a certain american style in 1959 he drove an Aston Martin to win if LeMond in his chicken rancher overalls in 66 for gt40s he developed took first and second in the same race something Ferrari thought would never happen but his longest legacy is the shelby mustang the original pony car given the nads of a quarter horse owners of vintage ones flocked to have Shelby sign in their glove box and I'm the last guy you'll find getting a picture with a celeb unless it's Ken now you buy a gt500 for the engine period 5.4 liter v8 supercharged kind of hard to miss that there it is sitting right on the top course the traditional Ford competition blue valve cover tells you that you've got a very special motor here it's a hand-built mill what they've done here different from 2010 though is they've gone to an all aluminum block versus last year's cast iron that shaved a hundred pounds or so and more importantly it shaved 100 pounds over the nose so this car doesn't plough the way the last year's model did and all the previous Shelby's before it it's a more expensive way to cast a block but it didn't really move the price of the car another exotic thing here is they do not have pressed in iron cylinder liners which most aluminum block high-performance cars have instead they've done up exotic treatment of the inside of the cylinder wall to really hardened it and make it durable and result good numbers 550 horsepower up ten from last year 510 foot-pounds of torque good numbers what's wrong with me crazy numbers and yet the MPG stays reasonable 1523 is that reasonable which is good enough and better enough this year to beat the gas guzzler tax this car used to get and thanks to that engine and a nice throaty H pipe design exhaust system the best seat in the house for audio in this car is not between speakers in the front but between these tips in the rear one proper gear box for this car at remax six-speed manual that's as heavy as a boat are in quick dry cement short throws but sort of unrefined our car has the Shelby Performance Package a limited-slip rear end with a shorter ratio to get out of a hole quicker tighter suspension special 19's on the front 20s in the rear q-ball shift knob different strikes now our cars loaded up inside with just about every toy which isn't a lot we have the electronics package which is Ford's generally good though not class-leading navigation system the I button is one of the interesting things on a ford vehicle like this because you have serious and serious travel link that brings you all kinds of information including traffic weather fuel prices movie listings a lot of folks haven't seen this in action yet so i tend to point that out bluetooth hands-free of course is all part of the sync system which is stock on this car so that gets you your media integration in your hands-free communication we have am FM and sirius satellite radio HD radio on this guy and kind of a nice way of portraying it i think notice this little area of the screen in the upper left the HD icon comes on when you're in HD radio and it does a nice job of showing you the multicast stations you know because HD radio has those hidden stations within the station's you listen to this one shows that the station I'm listening to now has its primary frequency that I'm on a multicast station on to and of course technically they can go all the way to eight though no station I know does that and the last thing that's interesting is a little kind of an easter egg here you've got the traction control for traction on or traction off but if you double tap it you get a sport mode for traction control that's the one that I liked get this car without the LCD head unit and you'll still get synced traffic directions and information with a send from google destination feature with a hundred fewer pounds on the nose the 2011 gt500 turns in quite nicely instead of ploughing on twisty roads we're splitting around cnet on the ride quality some found it punishing i found that exactly what car is like a Nissan GTR need to be firmly compliant though you'll still feel every bottle cap you drive over and might even be able to tell what brand it was now remember Ford weaponize as the Mustang in this trim by giving it a supercharged motor you've got to really get into it to get the blower to wake up and what it does the rewards are ample but it's not a car that has overwhelming power at initial tip in which I find both satisfying and not in everyday driving that makes the car very livable beast in performance driving sometimes the power actually comes on a little late for me but there's enough of it to make up for any delay maybe the word of 2011 this Mustang Shelby gt500 is still a live axle car in the rear so on the cutter roads I love little windy twisty little European style roads it's a handful the rear ends dancing and hopping all over the place the other minor frustration is the way that 510 foot-pounds of torque be Devils the hell out of traction control they kind of don't belong together on a car so I just turned it off otherwise traction controls on a whole lot of the time and you end up with numb throttle response and this may drive some of your nuts but one of the things I value most in it is the fact that it's got a nice compliant every day suspension and can acquit itself well when you push it not every performance car can do that ok let's price our little red stripe and friend about 50 grand is your base price for a gt500 not a cheap toy but it's got some great numbers three big packages to look at 3,500 bucks for Shelby performance kit 2500 for the electronics rig which is mostly about the hard drive base nav and media system 1304 shaker 1000 sound but not with the electronics rig that's a little frustrating to me one big ala carte piece and that would be the full glass roof here kind of booze wall but I think I'd do it and it's two thousand dollars but you're buying more than a collection of specs and options here you're spending 50 grand on a Mustang because you want something fast iconic and unapologetic like the guy whose name it wears the bottom line this week always ask yourself what would Carroll Shelby do unfortunately he probably grind his heel into your iPhone laptop external drive or browser bookmark cloud thing and tell you stop being such a sissy that's it for this time tune in next week for another look at the tech that was including molly's coverage from comic-con until then there's fresh video coming out of the oven every day at cnet tv.com see you next time thanks for watching